The Forgiven
by pixie1
Summary: What was Monica thinking when she left David in the woods in "Artificial Intelligence" (AI)?


Disclaimer: Monica and David belong to Spielberg and whoever else owns AI.  
Notes: This is an AI fanfic. The concept was thought up by the brilliant Warson Heyn. We challenged each other to write what Monica was thinking when she left David in the woods. His is around here somewhere. :)  
  
  
The Forgiven  
By: pixie  
  
  
I'm sorry.  
  
Trite words, meaningless, through the spill of emotions that threatened to drown her soul, to awash her utter being in torrents of anguish, of hopelessness, of desperation. Gone was the flame, gone was the love, gone was the hope. With the burn of each acidic tear that had dared touch her heart, she had blackened inside. Now nothing stood within her soul; it was the blackened cavity of a mother who had hoped and dreamed for the life of one son then, when it seemed miracles would prevail, had lost another. For she had loved another. Another son. A real son, lost at her own hand, gone because of her lack of compassion, because of her lack of understanding. Thrown out like the trash he had begun life as - scraps of metal formed to shape by blue flamed fire, seeking something, anything to burn, to eat through. Much like the fire that had scorched her being.   
  
I love you, she said, and it meant nothing. It meant everything.   
  
The world was an ocean, lost in tides of love and whirlpools of anger; rip tides of jealousy scavenged the beaches of all things great, all things good. And God was the fisherman with a dolphin trapped in his nets - carelessly he offered the bounty of the world, and carelessly he took back again, caring, in truth, for no one but himself. Then pain took the shape of a hundred predators, all who stole to achieve what was rightfully theirs to strive for. The happiness that comes with a kill all but makes up for the grief caused to another.   
  
All I can say is... Language is an annoying necessity. Good-bye, David. I'm sorry. Good-bye.  
  
Screw the poetics. Screw the pain. Screw the fear. Screw the world.  
  
Good-bye David. I love you. I always have.  
  
Monica gripped the steering wheel, the trees an endless river of molten green splatters on a madman's canvas, flying by at infinite miles an hour, unable or unwilling to pause, just for a moment, to allow safe passage through it's murky depths. Not to this lost traveler, anyway, who carelessly maneuvered too quickly and too wildly, hot salty liquid blinding her to the dangerous ripples and curves.  
  
I always loved you.  
  
She saw him, sitting there helplessly in the dirt, seeming entirely the child he so was not. His eyes sparkled with synthetic tears, his whole world tumbling into a never-ending abyss with a mere shake of her head. Gone were his hopes, his dreams, his naive wish for a real life, as a real boy - dreams being, of course, much too lofty an aspiration for one made up of metal rather than our own faulty skin and bone.   
  
Perfection is a curse. Others despise you for daring to be what they cannot.  
  
I will miss you. But... forever isn't something you want to be. Forever hurts too much.  
  
His cries, his *pleas* echoed cruelly in Monica's ears. His little body, lying there in the dirt, fingers ripping at grass and moss, lips shaking, eyes pleading. A face that would haunt her dreams for years to come, like an unwelcome specter, a poltergeist, who dared to infringe upon the face of the living. Those cherubic lips pleading with her, promising to be good, promising to be real.   
  
You are real. I love you, I love you *so*, *so* much. I have always loved you.  
  
I'm sorry, she said.  
  
Useless, pointless *words*. Dirty words, more sadistic than life itself. Forget language, forget grammar, sentences, paragraphs, and phrases, for the English language, nor any other language that ever existed or ever will exist can describe the pain, the heartache of losing the one you love, the one you need. No one in the history of man or Mecha has ever been able to explain the bond between mother and child. But it is there, and it is real, and it is *not* made of flesh and blood but of pain and hope and heartache - something all but the lowliest of creations posses, whether through brain and tissue and soul or emotion chip and digital relay devices. It is there.   
  
I love you.  
  
I'm sorry for your pain. I'm sorry you ever had hope. I'm sorry this wasn't real. I'm sorry you're not real. I'm sorry you're not mine. I'm sorry I hated you. I'm sorry I loved you. I'm always so goddammed sorry.  
  
Sorry.  
  
What does it mean?  
  
And she wept. Tears filled her vision, eyeliner tracing blackened roads down the hardness of her pale cheeks. Her teeth broke the skin of the lip she hadn't realized she was biting and she worshipped the metallic taste of life. Ah, the irony. When melted down, we all taste of copper and lead. Whether made of synthetics or tissue, we are all one and the same. One race, one people, one love. One hope for the future. One dream for the past. We are one. We are the same. We are all different.  
  
I'm sorry, David.   
  
His broken little body, his broken little heart... lost in the search for love. He followed a trail that leads so many astray, no matter who they are - man or machine, saint or whore, royalty or peasant, all stolen by the same imaginary force that guides life itself - love.  
  
And she died inside.   
  
With the tears came blackness, but she didn't care. She sank into the darkness, embracing it for what it was - an escape from this life that forced her to bring to ruin the boy she once called son. She released the wheel.   
  
And the ghostly green river of liquid branches took her inside.  
  
We are the same.  



End file.
